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By Aparna Pallavi The third national conference of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, held in Nagpur from February 1 to 3, 2008, went beyond the politics of nuclear militarisation and looked at the human, environmental and social questions intertwined with the issue
Gurdial Singh Sheetal of Nature Human Centric recalls an incident that occurred during his visit to the Jadugora uranium mines in Jharkhand. “We had a scientist with us who used an instrument to measure radiation whenever we stopped. In one village, he took a look at his instrument and cried, ‘Run!'. We doubled back to our car and sped off at maximum speed. Only after we were safely out of the danger zone did we realise that the residents of the village had nowhere to run to.” The third national conference of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, held in Nagpur from February 1 to 3, 2008, went beyond the politics of nuclear militarisation and looked into the human and social questions closely intertwined with the issue. The most important issue taken up at the conference and examined in detail was nuclear energy as a viable energy option. India's latest nuclear deal with the US pertains to the import of nuclear material for civilian and ‘peaceful' purposes -- more precisely, the generation of electricity. While speakers agreed that maximising electricity generation was a must for India's development, they insisted that atomic energy could not be regarded as an acceptable means to achieve that goal. It was unanimously agreed that the government was pushing the nuclear energy option for its own political and military agenda and that the myth regarding its viability needed to be debunked. Speaking on the inherently violent and environmentally destructive nature of the atomic energy process, Dr Chana Basavaiah, professor of political science from Osmania University, Hyderabad, said that every step of the process was fraught with untold damage to the environment and to human beings. Uranium mining, he said, causes radioactive dust and waste that contaminates land, water and air in the vicinity, and causes health problems on a colossal scale. He dismissed the claim that nuclear energy would successfully counter climate change as the nuclear process does not involve the release of greenhouse gases.“Fossil fuels are used at every stage in the process, right from exploration and mining to transportation and processing. Actually, it is more polluting than other sources of energy in that the process involves both greenhouse gases and radiation.” Former nuclear scientist Sandeep Pande of the National Alliance of People's Movements said that the nuclear energy option was prohibitively expensive apart from being environmentally catastrophic. “Even if India succeeds in harnessing its entire nuclear potential for producing electricity, the end result will be just about 9% of the domestic requirement. That is a very poor showing for all the expense and risks involved.” The nuclear sector's history of non-performance also came in for criticism. Dr Chana Basavaiah pointed out that while nuclear scientists like Dr Homi Bhabha and Dr Ramanna had predicted huge returns from the nuclear sector, 20,000 and 10,000 MW respectively, India had not been able to achieve even a fraction of these figures, despite the predicted time schedules having been exceeded. The astronomical costs involved, he said, is just one of the reasons for this failure. Noted journalist and peace activist Praful Bidwai pointed out that the nuclear sector's non-performance had been kept under wraps by the government in the name of ‘national security'; no public scrutiny is therefore permitted. “To give just one example,” he said, “the DRDO's (Defence Research and Development Organisation) nuclear submarine project has yielded no results for the last 30 years.” Admiral Ramdas, retired chief of naval staff, added that sustainable energy research was being scuttled to promote the nuclear option, which, he said, was nothing but a racket. Speakers also pointed out that nuclear energy was not just dangerous and expensive but also regressive. While nuclear energy as an energy option is being rejected all over the developed world, India appears overeager to adopt the option. Uranium mining: Suppression of dissent In the 1960s, when the Jadugora uranium mines were set up, there was no provision for seeking people's consent. Today, however, when such paradigms and provisions do exist they are openly being violated by the government. Public hearings at proposed uranium mining sites in Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Meghalaya show that although an overwhelming majority of people are against uranium mining the government is suppressing their voices in the name of national interest. The conference highlighted the issue of uranium mining, its impact on local populations and the draconian way in which it is being imposed on communities. Jharkhand-based journalist and filmmaker Shree Prakash spoke about how the Uranium Corporation of India Limited had never bothered to inform the tribal residents of Jadugora about the dangers of radiation. Forty years after the mines came into existence the Jharkhandi Organisation Against Radiation (JOAR) started asking questions about health problems arising from radiation. Even then, surprisingly, instead of providing direct and scientific answers, the company first tried to label the protesters ‘anti-national' and then started ridiculing their queries. For instance, he said: “When we claimed that radiation was causing sterility among people, by way of an answer the company asked us that if that were the case how was it that the number of schoolchildren in the area had gone up”. Prakash demanded that the nuclearisation issue, which at first glance appears far removed from the concerns of tribal and poor rural communities, be brought down to the grassroots level or else it would be impossible to build up a people's resistance on the issue. Dumka Murmu, general secretary of JOAR, wanted to know where the interests of radiation-affected tribals connected with the so-called ‘national interest' in whose name mining is being carried out. “Is our interest not a part of the national interest,” he asked. Dr Chana asked how this hazardous activity continued to get environmental clearance despite the obvious risks involved. “The Nalgonda mine is located right above the Nagarjuna Sagar dam, and if the process of uranium extraction starts here the water of the dam will inevitably be contaminated,” he said. He also described how in Nalgonda and also in the Kadapa district, voices of dissent among the people were being suppressed by force and dirty politics. He said that if it was impossible to withstand government pressure, people's movements should at least demand that baseline studies on the health situation be carried out at proposed mining sites before the mining started so that the government would not be able to deny the connection between radiation and emerging ailments, as it has been doing in Jadugora. The need for peace education An important area that received a lot of attention at the conference was the urgent need for peace education, especially among the new generation. Interestingly, while a full session was dedicated to this subject it was brought up at most other sessions as well, and at discussions outside sessions. Speakers and members of the audience acknowledged that the minds of the common people must be cleared of confrontationist propaganda and the bogey of ‘threat to national sovereignty', both of which are used to justify militarisation, if an effective people's movement against militarisation, nuclear or otherwise, is to be developed. Karamat Ali, veteran Pakistani peace activist from the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research, remarked while talking about the Indo-Pak situation that school textbooks were being used by governments to spread hate messages. But, he said, the positive thing is that, today, the general public in both countries is more aware of the real situation than they were a decade or two ago. “Today the common people talk about removing such incriminating passages from textbooks, which is a good sign.” This led to an animated discussion, and several members of the audience -- many of them peace activists -- recalled how, in their student days, textbooks, patriotic songs and other supposedly innocent educational material had been used to indoctrinate them with anti-Pakistan feelings and an unquestioning respect for the armed forces and police. And how as adults they had had to struggle to shake off that influence. Both speakers and audience came down heavily on concepts like ‘patriotism', ‘sovereignty' and ‘nationalism' which are used to justify militarism by the State. Journalist Anand Swarup Verma said: “Our basic stand is that militarism can never be rational -- that it is always irrational and we have to confront the jargon of nationalism and patriotism if we are to confront militarism.” Concern was expressed at the conscious effort to develop a military-confrontationist mindset through legitimised school activities like the NCC (National Cadet Corps). Praful Bidwai said that the NCC culture reinforced collective aggressive behaviour, hierarchy and unquestioning obedience, all of which are detrimental to a free and democratic society. Sandeep Pande noted that so much hatred is being spread in the name of education, and that it has been found that those who have been deprived of education have a mindset more conducive to peace. Sangeeta Krishan, education consultant from Delhi , described her experiences with incorporating peace education into the existing school syllabus instead of treating it as an additional subject. “Peace, harmony, truth, love, honesty, empathy, whatever value one wishes to impart to a child, have to be ingrained into his/her consciousness through every activity,” she said. “It cannot be treated as a finite subject that ends when the period is over.” Sandeep Sethi, a schoolteacher from Jaipur, described his model of peace education in which concepts from the school curriculum are developed through the imagery of war and peace in the form of plays. The conference concluded with a call for unconditional and total nuclear disarmament all over the world. As Shukla Sen of the Committee for Communal Amity put it: “It has to be understood clearly and without equivocation that there is nothing peaceful or positive about nuclear power. You can perhaps use guns and tanks for a good purpose occasionally, but nothing good at any level can come from things nuclear.” (Aparna Pallavi is an independent journalist based in Nagpur) InfoChange News & Features, February 2008
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